The present invention relates generally to information processing systems and more particularly to a methodology and implementation for enabling an improved processing system for accessing servers.
The Network File System (NFS) is one of the most prevalent forms of remote file systems in a distributed environment today. Typically an NFS server provides file system services to thousands of clients, typically running different operating systems. Since NFS configurations are star-based i.e., one server having multiple clients, one client overloading the server can cause serious degradation in file system access times for the other clients.
NFS is typically transmission control protocol (TCP) based, and uses sockets for server-client connection. NFS servers also have a limit on the number of concurrent threads that can service client requests. If one client is running an application that is unable to read from its end of the socket in a timely manner, the TCP stack on the client system might reach a point where it needs to send back TCP zero-window responses to the server. If this client has several requests to the server in this state, then the NFS server might not be able to service new client requests. The result of this is denial of file system access to the rest of the clients.
Thus, there is a need to provide a network server access processing system which is enabled to avoid the problems set forth above.